Greater Bank improves campaign management with SAS

A need for a deeper understanding of its customers was the catalyst for Greater Bank to investigate customer relationship strategies. And with the help of SAS, it now runs more focused campaigns, which have not only increased its share of customer wallet, but also opened its eyes to new marketing opportunities.

Greater Bank Customer Communications Manager, Rob Lavell, says while the building society never had a problem with acquiring customers, it did little with them once they joined.

“We were operating an acquisition-only model,” Lavell says. “We didn’t do any direct or customer marketing once the customer joined us. We knew we needed to sell more products to increase our customer ‘share of wallet’ so we took a step back to see what was possible."

Customer road map defines journey

The result was a five-stage road map with the first stage being to implement a campaign management solution. This strategy would provide the quickest wins in terms of getting more campaigns out, which Lavell says would improve metrics like number of products per customer, tenure and retention.

“These metrics are very important to us,” he says. “When competition in the market increased there were more channels for customers to buy products, so acquisition became more challenging and customer marketing more important.”

 

Greater Bank went to market with its requirements and chose SAS^® Marketing Automation as its campaign management solution.

Data access a key challenge

One of the marketing department’s key challenges was data access, as it only had access to one customer database that was run once a month.

“This meant we couldn’t use the data for campaigns as often by the time the data was extracted, it was never real-time enough,” Lavell says. “When we wanted to run a campaign, IT would pull the data out of a core system, which was then be sent to the mailing house. Sometimes this took between 6-8 weeks. We needed our own data and with the help of SAS, designed our own marketing datamart.”

The datamart is used for all marketing campaigns but their success relies on relevant messages being targeted at the right customers and this is where SAS is instrumental.

“We use SAS for predictive modelling to determine what offer to make to which customer or customer segment,” Lavell says. “We score every customer for a number of products or services such as savings or transaction accounts, general insurance, motor insurance, or mortgages.”

Since SAS was implemented, the success rate for product campaigns averages 5-10%, while the services campaigns have generated up to a 40% response rate. “When we ran a campaign to move people from paper statements to online, 40% of customers who were offered the choice moved,” Lavell says.

The department now runs all campaigns itself and has reduced the time-to-market for them by 6-8 weeks. “On the back of the SAS solution we’ve been able to modify our own systems so I can now build a campaign, select the list and have it live in under two hours,” Lavell says.

Masters of their marketing destiny

Lavell says the marketing department is now “the masters of their own destiny” – campaigns can be put in place without needing to go to any other department.

“Our relationship with customers is not only enhanced, but we are now offering them a more targeted array of products and services,” Lavell says. “This improves customer engagement and provides us with a greater share of wallet.”

The bank plans to implement SAS’ Visual Analytics solution to help with “fine-tuning” its campaigns. Lavell says SAS gave Greater Bank much more than expected. “We paid for software and a software implementation but we got so much more in the way of advice and assistance.”

He adds SAS has been instrumental in Greater Bank's aim of becoming an analytically driven organisation. “We’re well on the road to achieving this goal,” Lavell says. “There’s a lot more rigour in the way we manage and value our customer data these days and SAS has really opened our eyes to what is possible.”